Unlucky Him

By Paul Gray

JAKE'S THING by Kings ley Amis Viking; 276 pages; $9.95

The hero of Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis' first novel, was an exasperated rather than an angry young man. While characters out of John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe and others raged against the ossifying and stultifying British class system, Amis' feckless young professor did his best to fit in. Unfortunately, or fortunately, Jim's private loathing for the nest of ninnies that ruled his academic career kept coming to the fore. It was one thing to make secret faces when other backs were turned or to plan baroque revenges against his superiors, but quite another to wind up drunk on public occasions where prudence advised sobriety. Jim was finally booted, but Amis gave him a loud last laugh: he got the girl of his choice and a cushy job in London.

All that was 25 years ago. The inspired comedy of Lucky Jim has worn well, and so has Amis the man of letters. His characters, though, as Jake's Thing demonstrates, have grown pinched and crabby with age. Jake Richardson, 59, and his overweight wife Brenda have a problem. "I realized," Jake explains to his doctor, "something that used to be a big part of my life wasn't there any more." That thing is sex. A brash American who leads an encounter group grudgingly attended by Jake puts the matter succinctly: "What's with Jake is that he can't get it up any more, and what's with Brenda is she thinks it's her fault for having gotten middle-aged and fat, so she feels bad."

This semipublic humiliation is only one of the affronts that Jake must bear. His psychiatrist lays out a rigid regimen to revive the patient's libido. At night, Jake must plug himself into something called a nocturnal mensurator, a machine that registers and records signs of arousal during his sleep. He must buy and study "pictorial pornographic material" and also write out a sexual fantasy of his own imagining in not less than 600 words. Try as he might, Jake conies up 73 words short, despite much padding: "With lazy languorous movements she peels off the dress and reveals herself as completely stark naked and utterly nude." He and his wife doggedly engage in sessions of "nongenital sensate focusing." Jake even allows himself to be tested, in a most undignified manner, before a group of attentive medical students.

Amis deftly exploits the comic possibilities of Jake's ordeal, but the author has more on his mind, perhaps too much more, than comedy alone. Jake is a reactionary curmudgeon, and his view rules the novel. He may have a problem, but society is sick. He rejects his psychiatrist's diagnosis of repressions: "I was doing fine when things really were repressive, if they ever were, it's only since they've become, oh, permissive that I've had trouble." In the end, Jake issues a jeremiad against his own treatment and therapy in general; he also has traveled well down the road to misogyny.

As a result, Jake's Thing rests uncomfortably somewhere between novel and pamphlet. Amis remains a master of throwaway insults. Jake and Brenda go to a restaurant: "The food wasn't much good and they were rather nasty to you, but then it cost quite a lot." Yet Jake nev er amounts to much more than a petty character with a nagging but not earth-shattering problem; he cannot make love, but neither does he make any effort to in spire it. Lucky Jim won sympathy because his persecutors were old goats. Jake fails to do the same because the old goat is himself.

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